Pastorates and Coventry Groups
Pastorates
Reprinted from GraceNotes, May 2007
What is a Pastorate Anyway?
Well over a year ago, Rob began talking about
organizing our parish into “pastorates,” or small
neighborhood gatherings of parishioners who live in
the same geographic area. Rob and Ton did some
research and found that the Church of England has
made use of this concept for many years. In
London, some large parishes have weekly or monthly
gatherings of singles or special interest groups,
meeting at the church or someone’s home to share
liturgy and to socialize.
At Grace, pastorates may ultimately serve various
purposes. Monthly neighborhood groups can
integrate newcomers, improve communication within
the parish, and provide smaller settings where each
of us can get to know our neighbors better. As
groups evolve, they might become vehicles for
delivering pastoral care—one or two in a group
might wish to make a casserole for a member
recovering from surgery; others might offer rides to
church to a neighbor with a broken ankle, and so on.
Some pastorates might even want to work on a
short-term outreach project or event together, such
as collecting yarn for the shawl ministry. It might be
that for Advent, instead of our present reflection on
a gospel reading, a pastorate would read something
together about the obstacles to primary school
education in the Diocese of Thika in Kenya and
reflect on that. (Yes, this is a plug for the Millennium
Development Goals.)
Right now there are active pastorates in South
Amherst, Pelham, Belchertown, at Applewood
retirement community, and at Amity
Place/Greenleaves. Groups are starting up in greater
Northampton and in Echo Hill. A second South
Amherst group may be needed. Shutesbury or
Shutesbury/Leverett will be forming soon, as well as
Sunderland, Hadley, North Amherst, Amherst
Center, and the Hill Towns. The few members of the
parish in Granby, South Hadley, and Montague will
be invited to join other areas. There may be enough
for a South Deerfield/Greenfield group. There is
also a new young adults group meeting at Laura
Ricard’s house.
An ideal size for a pastorate seems to be about ten.
So far, it seems to take a base of about 20-30
households or more to generate an active regular
attendance of around ten. Each pastorate needs a
convener (who by no means needs to be the ongoing
host of the group). We have a printed format that
each group follows. We begin with introductions,
opening prayer and five minutes of silence. We then
read a recent gospel passage twice and share brief
reflections on it, including, how something in that
passage touches our life, community, nation, or the
world today. Some share personally, others more
generally. We listen to one another, puzzle over
passages together, confess misgivings and are glad to
have a small, safe setting in which to question if we
need to.
Our group begins at 7 p.m., and by 8 we move on to an excerpt from Daily Devotions at the Close of Day. Then we offer intercessions and thanksgivings and say the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect. At 8:15 our pastorate mills around our host’s table munching on cookies, crackers, cider, and coffee, and sets the date and location for the next meeting. Most head home by 8:30.
Mary McCarthy, convener of the Pelham Pastorate
Coventry Groups
Adapted from GraceNotes, February 2008
Coventry Groups provide opportunities for fellow parishioners at Grace Church to share time together in our homes or at other convenient gathering places. Unlike "pastorates" (the prayerful gatherings that we formed in recent years), Coventry Groups are quite informal, and are usually centered around a meal. Coventry Groups began in England during WWII when the parish community of Coventry Cathedral met in their “foyers” and living rooms after their church was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. It’s possible that given the right volunteers to coordinate the gatherings, we could bring back Coventry Groups to Grace Church sometime in Easter-tide. If we do meet again in our homes, it seems fitting for me to address a pastoral concern that arises every now and then. Gossip is a perennial plight within the Christian community. St. Paul confronted it in several of his emerging churches. How often do we, myself included, engage in making tiny niggling comments, mostly negative, about persons who are not present? Probably more times than we are likely to confess. Sometimes I come out of a meeting or a social event and I feel a kind of fatigue or tension in my soul. Later, upon reflection, I remember how, I perhaps without even being aware of it, I engaged in something seemingly trivial, but actually kind of mean-spirited and demeaning. If that person had been present, courtesy would have prevented us from saying anything at all. That’s gossip. Gossip is the result of giving into the temptation to put someone else down with the aim of elevating one’s own status. In traditional moral theology, gossip is related to the sins of Pride (putting oneself in the place of God) and Wrath (an anger that ends up consuming the wrathful). It’s one way that we violate our baptismal vow to “uphold the dignity of every human being.”
Faithfully Yours in Christ,
Rob+